March 2009

March 27, 2009

Even in troubled economic times, people are still giving to charities in need. It's a story that's repeated over and over again across the country. The same is true here at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.

Each year around the holidays, a group of staffers collect funds as part of a massive federal campaign for charity. This time around, we dug deep, giving an average of $225.00 per person. In fact, we reached not just 100% of our goal, but 253% of our expected goal, receiving the coveted Chairman's Award from Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough in addition to the Most Valuable Fundraising Award for our canned food drive and movie showing. Special thanks to our staff and top-notch keyworkers:

March 20, 2009

Okay, so not surprisingly, we're excited when we hear about one of our host venues doing something great with a SITES exhibition. It happens fairly often; sometimes museums offer compelling lectures and workshops; sometimes they have community art shows; sometimes they host family days. Trust us, it's all good!

Every once in a while, however, a museum thinks of something that we just never saw coming. Such was the case with the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, recent hosts of "Becoming American: Teenagers and Immigration, Photographs by Barbara Beirne." It's an exhibition that is intensely personal and tends to generate a lot of discussion, debate, and dialogue. To enhance that level of engagement, the Skirball installed a photo booth in the gallery. Yep, a photo booth--a relic of my brace-faced youth that I immediately connected days spent at the mall, eating cheese pizza and going to movies like "Teen Wolf." Alas, photo booths are still around and being put to much better uses than originally intended in the '80s mall era.

At the Skirball, visitors could sit for a row of photo-booth snapshots and then write an anecdote about their own immigration experiences. The images and stories were placed on a "feedback wall" in the gallery. "This interactive was hugely popular and became the impetus for a lot of family interaction about what to write," said a Skirball staff member. Ultimately, over 650 photos and stories were collected. An added bonus, of course, was the photo-booth picture that folks got to take home!

The exhibition, which started its 15-city national tour in 2006 and opens March 21 at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, features 50 stunning color and black-and-white photographs of Antarctica by award-winning photographer Joan Myers. Myers, like Herzog, was a recipient of a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant, which earned her a four-month stay on the continent. From her base at McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s primary research facility, she traversed the continent by foot, plane, helicopter, snowmobile, and Coast Guard icebreaker. Working in below-freezing temperatures, she captured Antarctica’s beauty, animal life above and below the ice, the abandoned huts of early explorers Scott and Shackleton, and the science conducted at the world’s most remote frontier.

In addition to producing the exhibition with SITES, Myers wrote a companion book of the same title that features nearly 200 photographs from her NSF grant period (plus four additional trips to Antarctica), journal entries, and science sidebars by New York Times writer Sandra Blakeslee. To me, the most interesting parts of the book (and Herzog’s film) are the depictions of daily life (food, clothing, housing, entertainment) and the eccentric and highly intelligent “polies” who voluntarily spend months there as support staff to the scientists.

If you can’t get to Chicago (or the exhibition’s next stops in Spartanburg, SC, and Seattle), then definitely check out Myers’ book and add Herzog’s documentary to your Netflix queue. As Myers writes in Wondrous Cold, “To be in Antarctica is to see our planet at its most elemental and unforgiving.”

Wondrous Cold is made possible through the generous support of Quark Expeditions.